Born in India in 1932 (son of a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers attached to the Indian Army and the daughter of the Colonel of Engineers, Bombay), he was educated in England (Northcliffe House Prep. School, Sussex - evacuated to Cornwall during World War II - Christ's Hospital School, Sussex, and The Thames Nautical Training College, H.M.S.Worcester).
After service as a navigating officer in P & O liners to India and Australia, he gained a berth as mariner (rated Master Gunner in the ship's books) aboard the replica seventeenth century bark Mayflower II on her recreation of the Pilgrim Fathers' voyage from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts under Commander Alan Villiers in 1957. The Mayflower herself remains in Plymouth, Mass., as part of a remarkable evocation of the Pilgrim Fathers' experience (Plimoth Plantation), and the hospitable folk of that town have recently honoured surviving members of the original transatlantic crew with honorary Residency.
After a period in the United States Peter Padfield travelled to the British Solomon Islands in the Pacific, where he sailed local craft and briefly and vainly panned for gold in the disused gold mines on Guadalcanal, in the late 1950s still showing the debris of the fierce wartime fighting for the island everywhere around the coast and in the jungle. He described his time in the Pacific and the Mayflower voyage in his first book The Sea is a Magic Carpet (Peter Davies, 1959), now out of print.
Returning to England, he worked in nautical journalism and in manufacturing industry until the international success of The Titanic and the Californian (Hodder & Stoughton , 1965) encouraged him to become independent. This was the first book to defend the reputation of the late Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian, who was censured at the British Titanic Inquiry for not going to the rescue of those who went down with the liner. The controversy continues to this day, gathering rather more excrescence than luminosity, but it is notable that the two 'Titanic' authors with professional navigational experience at sea before the age of satellite navigation, Peter Padfield and the late, greatly missed Leslie Harrison, are unequivocal in their condemnation of Stanley Lord's censure at the British Inquiry and adamant that the Californian could not possibly have been the ship whose lights were seen briefly from the Titanic as she sank. This has been virtually confirmed by the recent discovery of the wreck of the Titanic some twenty miles from the log position of the Californian that night - which means that each ship would have been well below the horizon from the other. Peter Padfield is convinced that Captain Stanley Lord was deliberately made the scapegoat for the loss of life from the Titanic in order to divert attention from the odium that would attach to British passenger shipping in general at a time of intense international transatlantic competition, to the Titanic's master and in particular to the British Board of Trade, whose regulations allowed these gigantic passenger liners to go to sea with lifeboat accommodation for only a fraction of the people aboard.
The struggle to clear the name of the captain of the Californian has been taken forward by Senan Maloney, whose meticulous investigation of the facts and theories that now surround them, published as A Ship Accused: The Case of the S.S.Californian Re-Examined (Cedric Information Services Ltd., 8 Chesterfield Grove, Castleknock, Dublin 15, Republic of Ireland), brings the argument up to date. Anyone who can read this book conscientiously and remain a critic of Captain Lord merits condolence.
Peter Padfield's next book, An Agony of Collisions (Hodder & Stoughton, 1966), was a criticism of the International Regulations for the Prevention of Collision at Sea, particularly in the light of the near universal use of radar. It had an impact on the discussion at the time, but its full recommendations were not adopted, and the collision regulations remain seriously deficient, particularly, he believes, in retaining the concept of a 'stand on' vessel which holds her course and speed - leading to dangerous uncertainty when the 'give way' vessel either fails to take avoiding action or delays her action too long.
He has recently been sent a book analysing this continued inadequacy of the collision regulations from historical, psychological and practical viewpoints and recommending the introduction of a new set of rules, computer-tested and suited to the radar age. He cannot recommend this book,The Fatal Flaw, too strongly to all who sail vessels large or small; and in particular, perhaps, to the members of the Safety of Navigation Committee at the International Maritime Organisation, who can make a real difference.
This book is obtainable for £10.00 plus £2.00 p&p from: Phaiacia Publishers, 21 Heol Pen-y-Craig, Ystradowen, Camarthenshire SA9 2YP.
For the current collision regulations which originated in the 19th century are, to quote from The Fatal Flaw, 'ambiguous, contradictory, vague, equivocal... [producing] uncertainty and anxiety on the part of the competent mariner... [resulting] in wastefully incomplete use of radar and often dangerously misleading use of VHF R/T, and a continuing irrational pursuit of further sophisticated technology to compensate for improper and inadequate use of existing equipment...' What more need be said? Action is needed now.
Subsequently Peter Padfield made a name as a naval historian with biographies of notable gunnery innovators, Admiral Sir Percy Scott (Aim Straight, Hodder & Stoughton, 1968) and Admiral Sir Philip Broke (Broke and the Shannon, Hodder & Stoughton, 1969); a history of naval gunnery and its effect on tactics (Guns at Sea, Hugh Evelyn, 1972) ; a history of the iron and steel battleship (The Battleship Era, Hart-Davis, 1973), which has recently been brought out in a revised paperback edition (Battleship, Birlinn, 2000); and a study of the great naval battles of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 'The Glorious First of June', 1794, to 'Trafalgar', 1805 (Nelson's War, Hart-Davis , 1975). This has recently been re-issued by Wordsworth Editions under the same title (2000).
A book he wrote on the naval armaments race before the first world war, The Great Naval Race: Anglo-German Naval Rivalry, 1900-1914 (Hart-Davis, 1976) fired an interest in German history which led him to write a trilogy of biographies of Nazi leaders: first Hitler's successor, Dönitz: the Last Führer (Gollancz, 1984);next Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (Macmillan, 1990) and Hess: Flight for the Führer (Weidenfeld, 1991), expanded with new information as Hess: the Führer's Disciple (Macmillan Papermac, 1993). All three have recently been brought out in paperback by Cassell (2001) - Hess: the Führer's Disciple further updated in this new edition from the release of the M.I.5 files on the case and the most recent research. Peter Padfield is convinced that the official cover-up on Hess's flight to Great Britain in May 1941 continues to this day since the peace proposals Hess undoubtedly brought with him to present to the Duke of Hamilton for the British 'peace party' in which he had been led to believe have never been released, nor has their existence been admitted; indeed very obvious attempts have been made to delete all record of these papers.
Other books by Peter Padfield include Rule Britannia: the Victorian and Edwardian Navy (Routledge, 1981), re-issued by Pimlico, 2002; Beneath the Houseflag of the P & O (Hutchinson, 1981), a social history of the P & O line in its days as the link between Great Britain and her Indian and eastern empire; a highly illustrated Armada: a Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (Gollancz, 1988); and War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict, 1939-1945 (John Murray, 1995), a history of the submarine operations of all major powers in World War II; a paperback edition was brought out by Pimlico in 1997.
He is currently working on a study of the rise of western power and influence with particular emphasis on the way that trading and naval supremacy has led to the liberal values associated with the West today - as opposed to the system of values which might have been expected to predominate had any of the great land powers, Imperial Spain, Napoleonic France, Imperial and Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia overcome the leading maritime power of their time. This expands a thesis he introduced in earlier volumes, Tide of Empires: Decisive Naval Campaigns in the Rise of the West, vol.i, 1481-1654; vol.ii, 1654-1763 (Routledge, 1979, 1981), now out of print.
The first volume of the new work, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1588-1782 (John Murray, 1999) was brought out in paperback by Pimlico in 2000. The second volume, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World, 1788-1851, was published by John Murray in August 2003 and awarded the Mountbatten Maritime Prize 2003 in November of that year. This volume begins with a detailed narrative of the course of the French Revolution of 1789 which seeks to reveal how the fundamental drives of a land power, France, impelled the Revolution in the opposite direction to that taken by revolutions in the maritime powers, the 'Glorious Revolution' (1688-9) in England and the American Revolution (1776-83). The focus subsequently falls on the astounding series of British naval victories in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars associated particularly with Horatio Nelson; after Nelson's death Napoleon Bonaparte takes centre stage, leading France to ultimate financial, technological, moral and martial disaster. Napoleon is portrayed as the ultimate French mistake. Readers might wonder why he continues to be venerated in and outside France! Finally, by 1851 Great Britain is inaugurating the modern world.
Peter Padfield has also written four novels, but pressure of historical work, occasional reviewing and television work, has interrupted any recent essay into fiction.
He married in 1960 and has a son and two daughters. He and his wife, Jane, gave up eating meat some twenty years ago in disgust at the way so many animals were - and of course still are - reared for the table, and as a general protest at the moral and ecological destruction wrought by intensive farming. They are extremely proud that all three of their offspring adhere to these principles and their son, Guy, is vegan, eschewing animal products of any description. Guy has a web site devoted to his consuming interest, the butterflies of Europe.
Peter Padfield gave up sailing a replica 1900 gaff-rigged Norfolk Shrimper some years ago when his children left home; he enjoys playing tennis, chess, swimming in the sea, and is currently attempting with many falls and scrapes and a disappointing lack of success to master the surprisingly difficult and elusive, but wonderfully rewarding and ecologically sound art of cross-country skiing. Lest this sound too virtuous, he is far removed from the 'liberal' consensus; he deplores the effects of socialist, rationalist and libertarian/relativist theories on morals, education and individual freedoms and on the burning issue of the day he is aghast at the idea of Great Britain either joining the Euro-zone or signing up to a European state managed by a centralised bureaucracy in the French style, either of which would mean freely surrendering more hard-won freedoms. This would seem to him to be a negation of Britain's historic role in preserving individual freedoms from an over-powerful state. Readers of Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom will recognise the argument!
The author with his wife, Jane, son Guy and his son's dog, Asha, in Switzerland, 2003
